My friend Dwayne has me thinking about remorse. In the last post (“Did Louis Kill Jesus?”), when I talked about making room for remorse, it wasn’t the bitter kind I had in mind. Mark Radecke (chaplain at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.) describes it better than I can. He quotes a priest in El Salvador who describes what happens to visitors when they experience the lavish hospitality of their poor Salvadoran hosts:
“A sweet shame comes over [the visitors], not bitter remorse but more like it feels when falling in love. The visitors feel themselves losing their grip; or better, they feel the world is losing its grip on them. What world? The world made up of important people like them and unimportant poor people like their hosts. As the poet Yeats says, ‘things fall apart,’ the visitors’ world is coming unhinged. They feel resistance, naturally, to a current that threatens to sweep them out of control. They feel a little confused–again–like the disorientation of falling in love. The earth trembles. My horizon is opening up. I’m on unfamiliar ground, entering a richer, more real world.”*
So why don’t more kids (or adults) feel this “sweet shame” when they encounter the Christian community at home? I wonder if it’s because our ministries spend more time telling young people to “get a grip” than helping them lose it–or, better, helping them feel the world lose its grip on them.
I am recently back from South Africa, where I traveled with ten seminarians in and around the townships of Cape Town. You can’t be in South Africa without coming face to face with poverty, violence, illness, hopelessness–thieves of the future for for many, many South African young people. This trip was no different. Playing with children with HIV, hearing the stories of apartheid, driving through townships where kids play among electrical wires criss-crossing corrugated tin shacks, I am not crazed with anger. I am silenced by shame. My poverty of spirit and selfishness are glaringly obvious beside South African Christians’ rich generosity and brazen hope. I am swept into the current of hospitality that runs through these people. They unhinge me. I am losing my grip, and I know it. I am falling in love.
I suppose you could say a kind of remorse sets in eventually, motivating me to offer some paltry form of assistance when I get back. But the really shameful part of my reaction to places like Khayelitsha Township is that they makes me want to run home, slam the door, and pray–not for South Africa–but for myself: “Jesus, forgive me, for I know not what I do.” Why does the earth tremble in a shanty town and not in most churches? Why do we come unhinged at faster in the streets than in the congregations we serve? What would loosen young people’s grip on the world–and the world’s grip on them? Does “falling in love” with people Jesus loves require a church that is poor, or simply “undone”? What would unhinge young people?
What would unhinge us?
*Cited by Mark Radecke, “Service Learning and Faith Formation,” Journal of College and Character, vol. 8 (July 2007), 27.
